My Time With Facebook

Being one of the millions of Facebook users, I was pretty happy to hear that they opened up a restricted API for those interested in developing applications that interact with it. I found myself with a few hours one weekend, and came up with a simple application using the API to check if you have any Facebook messages. Normally I wouldn’t post a task like this because it was rather trivial, but I decided to anyway because I did it in what I think is a cool way.

First, the actual code to check the messages is written in PHP and hosted on my web server. It will refresh every five seconds and check if you have new messages, displaying an icon to open a new browser window to check the messages. It can be seen here. Notice that I’m much better at writing code than designing interfaces ;) If you are interested, I’m using the official Facebook PHP5 client as a base for the web portion of the application. Full source is here.

The second part of the final application is a program written in C#. It is a small window that fits the dimensions of the used part of that page, using the maximize button to switch between the messages pane and the login pane when required. Internet Explorer is embedded in the application to do the rendering, but is stripped down in terms of navigation and context menu usage. It is still possible to navigate outside of the intended area, but this is a limitation on how Facebook designed it’s login page. The source of the application can be obtained here (zip format) and the executable itself can be obtained here (zip format). The source was built using Visual Studio 2005 – you should be able to build it without complication.

But enough of the program specifics.

Web applications are nice for developers. They develop the application in one place, and the changes are immediate to all users of the software. Feature and security updates are completely transparent, and best of all, the users don’t have to worry about them. Developer liability goes down because users aren’t running around with out of date and possibly insecure versions of their application, and users are happy because they always have the latest version of the software – a win-win situation. Even better, developers don’t have to concern themselves with deciding which operating systems or platforms to develop their primary application for because it is all online. This opens the application to a huge market of people. On the down side, web applications aren’t as accessible to as many people. Most people understand how to click an icon and use a program, it takes a higher level of acceptance to understand, for example, that their web browser could be used to replace Excel. The obvious solution to this problem is what is exemplified in the small application I’ve written to do an overall meaningless task. Embedding a browser in an application allows developers to have a binary executable that the masses are comfortable with that navigates solely to a web application that the developers prefer to maintain. With proper design, the web application can be made to always look good within the client executable, and following some rules of development will prevent people escaping to other sites from within the application. Everyone is happy.

I might expand on the idea later. There are other ways this would be useful, and some other ideas I’d like to tack to the list of supporting reasons for this concept. We’ll see :) It should also be noted that these thoughts originally came out of talking with the very intelligent Mike Manzano in my time working as his intern at Topia Technologies. See Mike, I *was* listening!